All that is holy can be held
in the meadow’s velvet palm:
To scale the bright hill at daybreak,
breath-smoke rising, soft noses curling
to scent the brown wind. The morning
announces the bright god’s passing:
long-lobed processions, pale bands of
ember-licked sky. Pink tongues flicker
over the beaten earth, scrape pine points
to blind shafts of white. The Earth is the Lord’s—
we catch at the tail tufts, scarlet flocked, flaring,
lean haunches blazing in all that shaggy light.
—
Iris A. Law is the author of Periodicity (Finishing Line, 2013). Her work has been published in numerous journals and appears in They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak, 2022) and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U of Akron, 2012). In 2009, Iris cofounded Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry, which she edited until its closure in 2022.
